Inside These Walls (18 page)
“Oh, goodness,” I say aloud.
Penelope sits up slowly. “What is it?”
“Someone added money to my canteen account.”
“Yeah, my mom did that for mine. She maxed it out.”
She rubs her arm, gazing up with vague, groggy interest at her unopened box on the desk. I fold the statement carefully and slip it back into its envelope. Perhaps this is a goodwill gift on Forrest’s part, a way to say he’s sorry for the past twenty-five years of my life. If that’s what it is, I’ll take it. But I can’t help but wonder if it’s something more.
I’d call him, but I don’t have his number. Write him, but I don’t have his address. I wish he had given me one or the other, but I didn’t ask. It never occurred to me that there would be a need.
“I’m going to skip chow hall tonight,” Penelope says. “I have snacks and stuff now.”
“You have to go. The last thing you want is for them to think you’re scared.”
“But I
am
scared.”
“Mind over matter,” I tell her, and then the sound of the dinner buzzer sends the cellblock into a clamor.
* * *
In the morning I coax Penelope out of bed, hand her a pair of fresh socks as she dresses sluggishly, take the brush from her and fix her hair while she stands before the mirror. The skin around her eye looks both smudged and inflamed, and her gaze is recalcitrant and woozy. I suspect she has a concussion, but as long as she’s able to stand upright they won’t do anything for that, anyway. As I let my hands drop to rest on her shoulders, I feel like she should have a hair bow to straighten or a Peter Pan collar to smooth. “Go back in there with your chin up,” I tell her.
“You told me to keep my head down.”
“I meant in spirit. If you hide in here all day, they’ll know you’re afraid. Don’t be afraid. Be indifferent.”
“How can you be
indifferent
to being
attacked?”
Still standing behind her, I hold out my forearm for her viewing, turned so she can see the Frankenstein stitching still puffed and pink. “It’s a means to an end.”
“That looks like it hurt.”
“Well, we’re all in here because we hurt other people. I try to keep my own pain in perspective that way.”
She hesitates. “I didn’t hurt anybody.”
“Let’s hope you can convince the jury of that.”
“I didn’t. Just between you and me, I didn’t.”
“Okay, well, when you’re at work here, you don’t want to send the message that you’re not the least bit dangerous. All right? Save that for court.”
I give her a meaningful look in the mirror, and she grins brokenly and says, “Bitch, I’m going to break your face if you look at me like that again.”
“Atta girl.”
The C.O. comes to collect her, and as the cell door clangs shut I sit on her bed and exhale a slow sigh through my nose. I sensed exactly what was going on —that urge to lay out the truth, unburden her soul, and know that she is
heard
. Until a person has felt nearly crushed beneath the weight of a secret, it’s almost impossible to understand how powerful is the urge to voice it. But I’ve been there, and I do. Yet
my
truth is I don’t want Penelope to confide in me. I don’t want to feel close to her, to comfort her or bond with her, because I want to save every little bit of that for my daughter. Ever since our last and most heated conversation I have felt helpless and full of anxiety, waiting for some small communication from her to signal whether we can keep moving forward.
Surely she must have been prepared for me to be someone who makes mistakes
, I think—but creating my own excuses doesn’t make me feel any less sick at heart. I’m bartering with God, always, in the back of my mind now.
If I can hold my grandchild in my arms one day. Say its name
. I want to start there, at the very place I failed with that child’s mother, and not allow my incarceration to excuse me from loving those people I have a right and an obligation to love. I want to live in the awe that resilient life presses forward in spite of the conspiring darkness. But at this moment, I just don’t know whether that’s true.
* * *
My letters to Karen Shepard and Annemarie go out in the day’s mail, and I’m relieved to see the message to my daughter collected and dropped into the great canvas bag drawn along by a wheeled cart, heavy as Santa’s sack. It won’t be misplaced, so long as it is already mixed in with so many others, and that is good. It’s an important letter, perhaps my most important one so far. I made a copy for myself, writing it down word by word onto scratch paper like a medieval scribe, so I could read over it later and feel comforted again by the truths I have relayed to her. And to my great relief the C.O. exchanges my envelope for a fresh one from Annemarie, my inmate number written across the front in her pretty italic handwriting. I sit on my bed and tear it open with tight, careful fingers. It is typed, like a business letter, then signed in black pen.
Dear Clara,
I don’t know what to say. As you might imagine, I was not overjoyed to learn the things you shared with me at our last meeting. The more I think about it, the more deeply it pains me to know I owe my life to the loss of several. That’s a concept I find repugnant, quite honestly. I don’t even know that I believe it to be true. I wonder, truthfully, if that is something you have told yourself to excuse what happened. That is to say, so you can believe some good came of your evil act, or tell yourself it wasn’t your irresponsibility that led to my conception, but circumstances that were out of your control.
I am not surprised to learn Ricky Rowan was my father, and I’m not sure why you manipulated me for so long to try to convince me otherwise. This sounds very strange, I know, but once when I was in middle school I went to a sleepover where my friends and I stayed up late watching that movie,
The Cathouse Murders
. An actor plays Ricky, of course, but during the closing credits they show mug shots of the real criminals (including you) alongside photos of the actors. I had an unexplainable feeling when I saw Ricky’s, like a jab to my chest, and I felt very drawn in by his face. It was almost like an instant crush, the way girls that age feel when we see a cute boy. I know now that what I sensed was the connection, maybe from the vague similarities between his face and mine. I guess my mind must have reacted to it like I was looking in a mirror and recognizing myself. What I’m saying to you is, you didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already somehow know. I guess you thought it was a big secret, and tried to keep it one, but I was a step ahead of you there.
I would be lying to tell you I’m not angry, but my anger is mostly at myself. I don’t know what I expected to get out of meeting you, except that I truly did want the medical family history you were somewhat able to provide. It seemed like we were getting to know each other, but now I have to question whether the reward for you was in playing mind games with me. If I hoped to understand more about my “identity” I believe I made a mistake. My identity is this: I am the daughter of Philip and Mary Anne Leska. I’m from Santa Barbara. I’m an Angels fan and an artist, a dog lover and a sorority sister. You don’t actually know me at all, and nothing I am—nothing that makes me,
me
—is due to you. You could pretend to understand me and my life, but the fact is you have been incarcerated for my entire lifetime. So I am deluding myself if I believe there is a connection to be found there, even on the most basic level. You did not intend or want to have me, but my own parents DID intend and want to have me. So even before you gave birth to me, I was already their daughter, the same way a package you have ordered is yours even before the mailman knocks and hands it over to you.
So I must inform you that I don’t intend to have further communication with you. The fact is that people don’t go to prison for their entire lives if they are really good but misunderstood people. That is an important thing to remember and I regret that it’s something I temporarily forgot.
Regards,
Annemarie Leska
I set the letter down with shaking hands and press my fist to my mouth.
Well,
I think, hearing my mother’s voice hastening into my mind, rushing in through its doorway to calm a scream.
No, now sit down, take a breath. Take a deep breath now
. She’s angry at me, Annemarie is, and hurt. She has a right to be, and a right to see it the way she does. But she’s wrong about my intentions, and there must be a way to convince her of that.
I breathe a shaky sigh. I fold her letter and slip it back into its envelope, then take out my handwritten copy of the one I’ve just sent to her and re-read it. I hope it will calm my nerves and give me a feeling of hope and momentum, because the stone wall that Annemarie’s letter hopes to build is a thing I can’t bear.
Dear Annemarie,
I have spent most of the past week returning again and again in my mind to our last conversation. I feel I did you a cruel disservice by giving you the impressions that I did about how your life began. I would like to take a big step back and share with you another story about your origins, which I dearly hope will stand in the place of those that trouble you, and give you a clearer picture of the truth. Because, as we discussed earlier, there is always more than one angle by which to view a story. Some are more true than others, but most, I am learning, are true in their own particular way.
In May of 1984—after Ricky and I had been together for a couple of months shy of three years—he was let go from his job at the art supply store, and that drove our relationship to a crisis point. I was nearly twenty-three years old, and most of my former classmates were engaged and planning their weddings; a few already had children. My own boyfriend, meanwhile, thought weddings were worthwhile to no one except medieval peasants and religious fanatics, and now he was unemployed as well. This wasn’t what I wanted out of life, and I was moving toward breaking up with him—bringing more and more of my possessions home from his house, coming by less frequently, and the like. He knew I was unhappy, and it made him nervous.
And so one weekend he declared that we were going on a surprise trip. Contrary to my stepbrother’s testimony, I did stay overnight at the Cathouse sometimes, and Ricky and I went on trips occasionally, as well. I merely lied to my parents and told them we were visiting Ricky’s grandmother, or that I was spending the night at the house of an understanding friend from the dentist’s office who had agreed to cover for me.
I left the cats in the care of Chris and Liz, and we got in Ricky’s little car and drove straight across California and Nevada, camping one night at Angel Lake. The mountains were spectacular, and the glacial lake cold but gloriously fun. He waded into the water in his shorts, deeper and deeper, until he was soaked to the waist. His shoulders got sunburned, but it was clear he was enjoying being a wildman out there in nature, eating what we could warm over a campfire and opting not to wear shoes or a shirt for as long as we stayed. But the next morning we were on the road to Utah, and I was only a little worried about what would happen if my mother needed to get in touch with me but couldn’t. I was having too good of a time to be really anxious.
Once we were in Utah, the road grew more and more remote. I couldn’t imagine where we were headed until I started seeing signs for the Spiral Jetty. I had been there once before with my mother, but that was not long after it was built, before the snowmelts came and covered it. Once I realized this I pointed out to Ricky that this was going to be a long drive to end up seeing nothing, and he simply said, “The drive is part of the art.”
Well, we got there, and sure enough it was just a shoreline on the Great Salt Lake. The lake itself was a gorgeous, stony blue, hazy as though covered by a white cataract, and the sky was the awe-inspiring, vivid dome I remembered—but the Jetty was gone. I turned to Ricky and gestured to the water. “See,” I said, “you already told me it was buried. You didn’t have to drive us out here to prove it.”
“But it being buried is part of the art,” he insisted. He was pulling our tent out of the trunk. “Besides, don’t you want to go home and say you went camping on the shore of Atlantis?”
I laughed. I looked out at the lake. He and I were both well-trained in art, but his understanding of modern and postmodern art was certainly superior to mine. I liked classical and pretty things, the Degas ballerinas and Greek Revival paintings. I could appreciate
edgy
if it went no farther than the symbolism in a Kahlo or an O’Keeffe. Ricky liked the avant-garde or perplexing or grotesque. I wouldn’t have looked out at a featureless lake and thought, ah, how clever of the artist to put his work in a place where it will be devoured by nature. But once Ricky explained it, I could appreciate it in a certain way.
After the sun went down we built a fire, and he took out a packet of henna he had picked up at the art supply store just before he was cut from the staff. “It’s something Indian women use to decorate their hands before a wedding,” he explained. “It’s really cool. We just got it in.” He set up the boom box and put in the tape he had made for me for Valentine’s Day. He asked me to show him my palms. The idea of getting my palms decorated was very strange and foreign, but I sat still by the fire, leaning in toward him, as he illuminated my palms and then the backs of my hands with the most intricate, elaborate patterns, winding around each finger and covering every revealing line. Then he put lemon juice on it as a fixative, and once my hands were dry I asked to do the insides of his arms, where the hair wouldn’t get in the way. He smiled as I worked the designs onto his skin, acting as if I were a tattoo artist—and you must remember, respectable people did not get tattoos back then—covering his arms with mermaids and playing cards and hearts pierced by arrows. In the end we both looked very festive, quite prepared for an Indian wedding, except for the fact that we were at a lakeside in Utah.
By now the tape had played on both sides, and Ricky flipped it over again before he stood and offered me his hand. I grasped it with my henna-covered one and let him pull me up. He set his palm against the small of my back and brought my hips to his; he rested his forehead against mine, so our noses were touching. Ricky was a good slow dancer. His parents had made him attend cotillion classes as a young teenager, so he wasn’t shy about it. The song—I remember this part well—was called
Time After Time
, by a woman named Cyndi Lauper. Slowly, there on the shore of the Great Salt Lake—or perhaps, you might say, the shore of Atlantis—we danced to that song, alone. If by all of this sweetness he meant to stop me from breaking up with him, it worked. I had to admit to myself, as we got in the car the next morning and began the long drive back to San Jose, that although he could be infuriating and childish and indifferent to rules, I loved him too much to give up on him. Some men simply need more time.
So it’s important for you to understand, Annemarie, that this is also part of the story of your origin, your conception. I was ready to part ways with him then, and a different kind of man would have feigned apathy or bravado about that, shrugged off the breakup and moved on. — Yes, it’s true that the many things he and I did wrong were a part of what ensured that you would be born. But you also could not have been born without the careful cultivation of all this love, the effort and commitment that went into maintaining it.
I wish I could share with you every one of the moments that ushered your soul a little closer to the Earth. I wish he could share them with you as well. While I would like to believe that everything ultimately works out the way it’s meant to, I am not above calling a loss a loss.
Earnestly, and with more fondness than you know,
Clara